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Pop Culture in the Age of Obama

The term “pop culture” appeared around 1960, just as its meaning became confused. High-culture up-and-comers were embracing pop imagery and tropes with a vengeance, and the best and brightest creators of entertainment were suddenly producing work of thrilling sophistication and complexity. It was also the coming-of-age moment for the first baby boomers, a cohort defined by its television-saturated upbringing and unparalleled level of college education — a generation, in other words, unapologetic in its love of commercial pop even as it put on arty airs.

During the 1960s and ’70s, serious novelists could be both central cultural figures and potential mass-market celebrities. People who hadn’t read a word of a first-rate contemporary novel — no Cheever, no Bellow, no Salinger, Heller, Styron, Doctorow, Updike or Roth — nevertheless knew the novelists’ names. Back then, novels by each of those authors became No. 1 New York Times best sellers, and Updike, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal were also Time magazine cover subjects — as were Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Günter Grass.

And then everything changed. It has been almost a decade since Time put a living novelist (Stephen King) on its cover. Only a handful of literary novelists born since World War II have published a book that reached the top of the Times list, and two of those best sellers were the result of cult leaders’ shocking public pronouncements — the Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, and Oprah Winfrey’s 2001 endorsement of Jonathan Franzen.

But irony of ironies, after literature was evicted from mass culture, pop culture itself began to fragment and lose its heretofore defining quality as the ubiqui­tous stuff that everybody consumed. In a typical week nowadays, fewer than 6 percent of Americans see the most popular scripted series on television. So we have arrived at a strange new historical moment. Literature is just another (minor) sector of the culture industry, but now even the mandarins agree that certain pop artifacts — “The Sopranos,” “The Simpsons,” Radiohead — are cultural creations of the first rank. Meanwhile, popular culture and mass media are no longer very popular or mass. By and large, both entertainment and art appeal to niches, cultural tribes that range in size from tiny to smallish.

But our hunger for massively shared cultural moments has not disappeared. Thus the astonishing decade-long global frenzy for the Harry Potter novels, and our recent two-week obsession over Michael Jackson as a nostalgic artifact of the late super-pop era. And also the astonishing rise of Barack Obama. Obama’s presidency will undoubtedly influence the tone and substance of pop culture. But what’s most pop culturally interesting about him is not so much Obama as cause but Obama as effect. He strategically harnessed pop culture, he produced it with two best-selling books, he avidly consumes it. In our Balkanized era, Barack Obama simply is the pop cultural colossus.

Three big trends made his ascension possible. First there was the steady blackening of American popular culture. He was 4 when “I Spy,” co-starring Bill Cosby, first went on the air, and 6 when Sidney Poitierstarred in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” In the early ’80s, just as Obama entered adulthood, Jackson released the best-selling record ever, Bryant Gumbel was the new “Today” show anchor, Michael Jordan became the greatest American athlete, “The Cosby Show” was the most popular show on television, and Oprah went national. Then came Tiger Woods and white youth’s embrace of hip-hop. This transformation had been happening incrementally for more than a century, as Leon Wynter explained in his great book, “American Skin.” “The future,” Wynter wrote pres­ciently in 2002, “is not about black people leading black people,” but “about black people leading all Americans.”

Then there’s our turn-of-the-21st-century pop-intellectual zeitgeist. Although most of the seats for serious novelists at the mass-market table were removed, PowerPointable nonfiction books retained their ability to shape the popular discourse. Malcolm Gladwell’s and Thomas Friedman’s books starting with “The Tipping Point” (2000) and “The World Is Flat” (2005), Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner’s “Freakonomics” (2005) and Michael Pollan’s “In Defense of Food” (2008) have become phenomenally popular by embodying a cheerful, bracing, empiricist rigor without tilting too strongly left or right. They are lucid and accessible, carefully researched but not boring, pop but not too pop. And they have flourished in counterpoint to the harsh, predictably ideological manifestoes — from Rush Limbaugh’s “Way Things Ought to Be” (1992) to Michael Moore’s “Stupid White Men” (2001) — that dominated the pop political discourse during the preceding decade. In other words, the new species of pop-intellectual best seller is like Barack Obama himself.

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The third big trend that helped usher in the Age of Obama was the morphing of news into entertainment. During the last decade, with the proliferation of Web news and 24/7 cable jabberfests, the old ratio of news supply to demand was upended. The vast new maw needed feeding, and a charismatic young black candidate and then president was a godsend. “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” finally dissolved the remaining membrane between news and pop culture. What’s more, the Comedy Central hybrids are (like Obama) fair-mindedly center-left, manifestly smarter (like Obama) than their conventional counterparts and hosted by men (like Obama) born in the early ’60s.

Previous national politicians leveraged their political fame into publishing success. But Obama became a best-selling author before he announced his candidacy. And why did he get a book deal? Because of an amazing prime-time television performance, his keynote speech as a little-known senatorial candidate at the 2004 Democratic convention. Thus his carefully platformed pop-cultural cred enabled his presidency. When the McCain campaign imagined last summer that it was dissing Obama by calling him “the biggest celebrity in the world,” it was clear who was clueless and who had the cultural winds at his back.

The Obama team harnessed digital social networks to organize rock-concert-like rallies. It used pop music and music videos better than any other presidential campaign. Shepard Fairey’s high-­contrast “Hope” poster was a perfect pop icon for the moment, both a quasi parody of old-school propaganda and the uncynical real thing.

And then there’s Obama the tasteful pop-culture-consuming American, redefining presidential regular-guyness. On his iPod, Obama says, are “probably 30 Dylan songs,” “African dance music,” “Javanese flute music,” Yo-Yo Ma, Howl­in’ Wolf, John Coltrane, Jay-Z, Frank Sinatra and Sheryl Crow. Having admitted getting high as a young man, as president he met with the Grateful Dead. The first movie he watched in the White House was “Slumdog Millionaire.” He doesn’t just name-check, but convincingly declaims — he prefers Spider-Man and Batman to Superman because “they have some inner turmoil.” And — crucially — he’s even acute and impolitic enough to discriminate between quality and crud: his favorite movies are the first two “Godfather” films, but he acknowledges the inferiority of “Godfather III” and says his wife “likes ‘American Idol,’ her and the girls, in a way that I don’t entirely get.” Yet the democratic spectacle of “American Idol” is of a piece with Obamaism, of course, given that the show is all about the excitement of watching a telegenic, talented nobody transformed by national referendum into a celebrity.

There’s a lesson here about how we think of consuming culture. Maybe we can once and for all stop defaulting to easy categorical boundaries between high and low, and discriminate instead between the well made and the shoddy. After all, didn’t Obama’s election prove that people will respond to vision and intelligence, that familiar binary (racial and ideological) pigeonholes no longer necessarily apply, and that the very good can occasionally become very, very popular?

Kurt Andersen is the author of the novels “Heyday” and “Turn of the Century.” His new book is “Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America.”